Chuck Todd: ‘We’re Going to Look Back Tonight as the Beginning of the End of the Primary’

26 Apr 2016

Tuesday after the results of Tuesday’s primaries in five states were reported as all wins for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press” declared this to be the “beginning of the end” of this year’s Republican presidential primary.

“I would have this conversation week after week,” Todd said. “We’d talk about Donald Trump is winning, but he can’t get over 50 percent. We’re now talking about him getting over 60 percent, perhaps, in multiple states tonight. Probably over 50 percent in all five states tonight. That’s a big deal. We’re going to, I think we’re going to look back on tonight and say it was the beginning of the end of this primary battle because Trump is doing a whole heck of a lot better than anybody projected he would do on this night just five weeks ago.”

“I had an operative swear to me about a month ago, we can hold Trump under 1,000 delegates by the end of this primary season,” he added. “My gosh, he could be at 1,000 by the middle of May. We’re already at 900 now after what we’ve projected the delegates we’ve awarded him just based on the projection we’ve made in three primary states. He could get close to 950. You know, I’m just trying to understand how Indiana is going to make up all that ground. Trump having now not just a narrow path, but a clear path to this nomination if these numbers are holding.